look marginally more welcoming than the seven feet of dense wood immediately beneath them.
There’s a silver box with buttons below the ‘Newnham House’ sign – an intercom. I’d need to press those buttons if I wanted to gain access, which I definitely don’t.
Is this what too much money does to people? Or is it only what too much money does to Lewis Braid? There’s no way this house is Flora’s choice – not the Flora I knew. And Lewis had a knack for getting his way whenever they disagreed.
‘Where are we? This isn’t the ground.’ My son has finally noticed his surroundings.
‘I know.’
‘Then why’ve we stopped? I thought you knew where we’re going?’
‘I do.’
‘The warm-up starts in, like, fifteen minutes.’
‘And it’ll only take us ten to drive there. Lucky, eh?’ I smile brightly, switching on the engine.
Ben turns back to his phone with a sigh. He is considerate enough not to say, ‘I wish Dad was driving me.’ According to our family folklore, Dominic is a good driver who plans well and allows enough time, and I am the opposite. This week was Dom’s turn to do football duty. He couldn’t believe his luck when I said I fancied an outing and offered to go instead. I doubt he remembers that Flora and Lewis moved to very near St Ives soon after we last saw them. Even if he does, he wouldn’t suspect I had a secret agenda. Dominic would never take a ten-minute detour in order to see the current home of someone he hadn’t seen for twelve years – therefore, in his mind, neither would I.
‘Fuck off!’ Ben says to his phone.
‘Ben. What have we—’
‘Sorry.’ He makes that sound like a swear word too. ‘Do you have a list of everything Dad’s ever done wrong?’
‘What? No, of course not.’
‘So it’s not normal, then? Most people in relationships don’t do it?’
‘A written list? Definitely not.’
‘Lauren’s got a list on her phone of everything I’ve done wrong since we’ve been a thing.’
Lauren, a model-level-beautiful girl who is excessively polite to me and eats nothing apart from noodles according to both my children, describes herself as Ben’s girlfriend. He objects to this terminology and insists that they are merely ‘a thing’.
‘But you’ve never done anything wrong to Lauren, have you? Or have you?’ They’ve only been together – if that’s the right way to put it – for three weeks.
‘I put two “x”s in my last message instead of three. That’s the latest thing.’
‘Did you do it deliberately?’
‘No. I didn’t even know I’d done it. Didn’t think about it.’
I indicate to turn onto the main road, wishing I had a choice and could stay a bit longer on Wyddial Lane. Why? I did what I wanted to do, saw what there was to see from the outside. That ought to feel like enough.
‘Who the fu— Who counts kisses in a message?’ Ben says.
‘Girls do. Some girls, anyway. Lauren’s obviously one of them.’
‘First the problem was me not doing it – she’d always put a line of “x”s at the bottom of her messages and I never would, and she thought that meant I don’t care about her – so I started putting them in, and now she’s counting how many, and thinking it means something if I do one less than in the last message. That’s crazy, right?’
‘Ask Zannah if she counts how many kisses Murad puts in each message.’ Murad, to my knowledge, has only once done something wrong in the year and a half that he and Zannah have been whatever-they-call-it, and he turned up looking tearful the following morning, clutching a dozen red roses. Zannah was delighted, both by the roses and by the news of the sleepless night he’d suffered after ‘criticising me when I’d done fuck all wrong. Mum, I literally don’t care what you think about me swearing right now. Sometimes I need to swear, or I’d throw myself off a bridge.’
I would be very surprised if my daughter did not keep on top of the kisses-per-message statistics.
Ben groans. ‘And now, because I didn’t instantly reply and say “Oh, sorry, sorry”, and send a long line of “x”s, she’s going to accuse me of blanking her.’
‘So why not reply and send more kisses?’
‘No! Why should I?’
‘You’re right. You shouldn’t.’ Poor boy. He’s fourteen, for God’s sake – too young to be engaged in fraught relationship negotiations.